One of the most challenging problems facing the pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical industries is delivering therapeutic agents past the various semi-permeable membranes within the body. Particularly in the case of macromolecules, the obstacle to cost effective or convenient treatment is often due to the lack of an adequate drug delivery system. In turn, this issue dictates whether production of a drug is economically feasible. Thus the search for alternative delivery systems often rivals the search for new drugs themselves.
Gene transfer methods can be viewed as a paradigm of macromolecular drug delivery. These methods can be divided into three categories: physical (e.g., electroporation, direct gene transfer, and particle bombardment), chemical (e.g., proteinoids, microemulsions, and liposomes), and biological (e.g., virus-derived vectors, and receptor-mediated uptake). Amongst biological transfer methods, receptor-mediated uptake is a particularly promising approach. Targeting a ligand to an endocytosed receptor acts as a means to ferry that ligand into the cell. However, one drawback of receptor-mediated systems has been their general reliance on intravenous administration which severely limits their use.
Mucosal epithelial cells line a number of readily accessible tissues such as those found in the upper respiratory and gastrointestinal tracts. The accessibility of these cells make them an attractive target for drug delivery. See, e.g., Ferkol et al., J. Clin. Invest. 92:2394-2400 (1993); Ferkol et al., J. Clin. Invest. 95:493-502 (1995). Retrograde transport of an antibody from the lumenal to the basolateral surface of epithelial cells has been reported, albeit at very low levels. Breitfeld et al., J. Cell Biology 109:475-486 (1989). In that study, movement across the cell was followed by binding an antibody to the secretory component of polymeric immunoglobulin receptor (pIgR). Relative to the level of basolateral to apical transport, Breitfeld et al. reported that less than 5% of the transport was retrograde in nature. The nominal level of counter-transport minimizes the utility of secretory component as a means to deliver biologically active compositions into cells. Moreover, due to the abundance of cleaved pIgR in the lumen, binding of ligand to cleaved pIgR, rather than the intact pIgR of the cell surface, would diminish the utility of pIgR counter-transport as a mechanism of drug delivery.
Accordingly, what is needed in the art is a means to convey ligands into or across a cell surface with high efficiency. More particularly, what is needed in the art is a means to deliver macromolecules to, into, or across cells lining the gastrointestinal or respiratory tracts. The present invention provides these and other advantages.